Walk Alongside Me for a Bit…

“Elisa’s Spot”

“Empaths naturally struggle to accept the fact that not every issue, conflict, question, or dilemma can be resolved. One strong empathic lesson is to come to terms with the reality that not everything has an attainable resolution or concrete answer, especially in the immediate sense. If the resolution or closure of an issue is truly out of one’s own hands, nothing more can be done and that’s just how it’ll have to be. Not every issue, conflict, or misunderstanding can be resolved; sometimes the best choice is moving on…”
–Raven Digitalis, Esoteric Empathy

“She spends half her time making herself attractive to men, and the other half trying to divine which of the attracted are serious enough to marry her, and which wish to ram her against the nearest wall and jab into her recklessly.”
–Maya Angelou

“Faith and prayer are important elements of my belief in God. Faith is my rock, but it is also the way I align my thoughts, my heart, and my actions to realize my goals. Prayer is the way I connect with the energy of God, it is also the way I clarify to myself what i am asking for. Thus, when I enter a challenging and uncertain situation I say, ‘I’m putting my trust in my faith, Dear Lord, and I am stepping out on Your Word.'”
–Maya Angelou

But Ford […Aaron Ford, the special agent in charge at the FBI’s Newark division] disagreed: “Any time an individual or group uses force or violence to intimidate, coerce or change the mission of a government, that is terrorism and in this case, it’s domestic terrorism.”

–unless it’s the government of the United States, then any opposing this become what they call insurgents.(insert own sarcasm here)

“Like most humanoids, I am burdened with what the Buddhists call the ‘monkey mind’–the thoughts that swing from limb to limb, stopping only to scratch themselves, spit and howl. From the distant past to the unknowable future, my mind swings wildly through time, touching on dozens of ideas a minute, unharnessed and undisciplined. This in itself is not necessarily a problem; the problem is the emotional attachment that goes along with the thinking. Happy thoughts make me happy, but–whoop!–how quickly i swing again into obsessive worry, blowing the mood; and then it’s the remembrance of an angry moment and I start to get hot and pissed off all over again; and then my mind decides it might be a good time to start feeling sorry for itself, and loneliness follows promptly. You are, after all, what you think. Your emotions are the slaves to your thoughts, and you are the slave to your emotions.”
–Elizabeth Gilbert

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“At such moments, courage is necessary,” Mr. Obama said. “We need courage to stand up to hate, not just in others, but in ourselves. At such moments, we need the courage to stand up to dogma, not just in others, but in ourselves.”
–Barack Obama

Tea Time

“There is a fever that overcomes a book-lover who has limited time to spend on Ober’s island. A fever to read. Or at least to open the books. There is no question of finishing or even delving deeply. I have only days. Among the books, I feel what is almost a low swell of grief, a panic.”
— Louise Erdrich, Books and Islands in Ojibway Country

“Books are our guardians of memory, tutors in language, pathways to reason, and our golden gate to the royal road of imagination. Books take us to new places where boundaries are not set by someone else’s pictures on a television screen and our thoughts are not drowned out by sounds on a boom box. Books help us pose the unimagined question and to accept the unwelcome answer. Books convince rather than coerce. They are oases of coherence where things are put together rather than just taken apart. Good books take us away from the bumper cars of emotion and polemics in the media into trains of thought that can lead us into places we might not otherwise ever discover.

Reading a book can become a private conversation with someone from a time and place other than our own — a voyage into both mastery and mystery.”
— John H. Billington, “The Modern Library and Global Democracy,” from The Meaning of the Library; ed. Alice Crawford